Streaming

George Rogers Clark was only 26 when he led a daring raid during the Revolutionary War to capture British forts and neutralize their efforts on the frontier west of the Alleghenies. His victories helped bring Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and other Midwest states into the U.S. after the war.

The Egyptian pharaohs tried to create immortality for their god-king legacy. They attempted it with mummification and huge tombs, but most were destroyed by grave robbers and the passage of time. Still, many images and mummies remain, but one pharaoh's legacy, Akhenaton's, was deliberately obliterated by polytheistic priests because his monotheism threatened their power.

Like the Phoenicians, the Greeks were a collection of city states during their great Hellenic period. And even though they often made war on each other, every four years, during the Olympic Games, they sublimated their violence into a fusion of mind and body worship dedicated to their chief god, Zeus. This great ideal of the Greeks has been more long lasting throughout history than any other.

Like the Romans, the Incas conquered a large number of cultures, binding them together with a network of roads. The Incas also showed remarkable engineering skills in buildings and terraced farming fields, as at Machu Picchu. But the Inca impatience for power is revealed in their ruthless oppression of the defeated peoples.

The Khmer Empire, now modern Cambodia, was largely unknown until the nineteenth-century discovery of the ruins of Angkor Wat, an astonishing temple complex. Long abandoned, its huge and beautiful symmetry reveals it as an attempt to create a Hindu concept of Heaven, here on earth. Yet it also reveals a society where peasants and artisans supported an absolute ruler.

Emancipation was only the beginning of a long road to freedom for those released from slavery. Following the Civil War, an immense economic and political effort was undertaken, focused on reunifying the divided nation.

A new era of mass production arose in the United States because of technological innovations, a favorable patent system, new forms of factory organization, an abundant supply of natural resources, and foreign investment.